


External Honesty, More Likely

by broken_ankle



Series: Repressing Feelings, Hiding Things. You Know, the Family Business [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Aromantic Asexual Castiel (Supernatural), Aromantic Dean Winchester, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Internalized Arophobia, M/M, POV Second Person, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Hatred, Self-Sacrifice, Self-Worth Issues, Sex-Repulsed Castiel (Supernatural), Touch-Starved Dean Winchester, not in the physical harm kind of way
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:40:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26517598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/broken_ankle/pseuds/broken_ankle
Summary: It's been two months since that incubus hunt. Plenty of time to forget and repress, right?
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Series: Repressing Feelings, Hiding Things. You Know, the Family Business [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1943218
Comments: 6
Kudos: 16





	External Honesty, More Likely

**Author's Note:**

> Look at that! A headcanon I didn't know I had! (Not talking about aroace Cas. You can pry aroace Cas from my cold dead fingers.)
> 
> Yeah, this maybe doesn't make much sense without the one before, though you just need to know that Dean was under an incubus' influence and made advances on Cas, but Cas wouldn't have any of that and Dean ended up thinking it was because Cas didn't want him at all.
> 
> Mind the tags. Dean is not in a good mental space (is he ever, though, is the question) and it shows. Dean is aromantic but he thinks it's something wrong with him. The non-human character (aka Cas) is aroace. Warnings for references to brief sexual situations Cas was involved in and felt distressed by. Reader discretion is advised.
> 
> If I wrote something offensive to alloaros and/or aroaces, I'm sorry, it wasn't my intention. Please tell me if that's the case, I'll change/fix/remove it.

It’s been two months. Two months since the incubus hunt that you don’t think about.

As strange and disquieting as the man was, from the way he’d casually struck a conversation with Cas in Enochian of all languages to how he looked at the angel, like he was talking to something a couple inches above his head, to his constant references to cards and archery, Travers still remains the safest aspect of that hunt. Everything else—

You don’t think about everything else.

Cas sticks around more and more, returning to Heaven only when he’s directly summoned. He says that Raphael struggles with his new role as, well, God, in a way–being the one in charge of the Host and the one the angels look up to for orders and all that–but he’s slowly coming around to thinking with his own head. And that kicked off a whole storm of questions about free will, and angels, and had Michael—but you didn’t ask them, and from the fact that Sam didn’t either, you think you’re the only one who’s thinking them.

You’ve always focused on the most useless of things.

Sometimes Sam looks at you funny, like he’s about to ask something, but then he shakes his head and goes back to whatever he was doing. You’re glad he leaves you alone, you know you’re not exactly living up to the kind of brother he knows, but you can’t bring himself to fake an eagerness that went down the drain when Cas—

You don’t think about the incubus hunt.

You can’t quite bring yourself to keep up the rhythm of before, but you still go out to bars, you drink–too much, you know, you feel it when Cas lets his hand brush against you to repair whatever you’ve done now to your liver, but you don’t acknowledge it, you can’t acknowledge it, and you’re too greedy anyway, you’ll take whatever touch you can, even if it’s a fleeting drag of a hand over your arm, even if it’s only Cas that does it–you pick up women, only women, what would Sam think if you—but often you sleep in the Impala, because Sam knows a brother, and you can’t show him the brother he knows is not you, not really, not entirely, maybe he’s never been. You think Cas knows, but Cas always seems to know everything and never says anything about it, so it’s okay, it’s alright, it’s fine, you can keep this up, you can, you have to.

You catch Cas looking at you every now and then, and you catch him looking down at a scrap of paper that you remember Travers slipping him before leaving, and you catch him on Sam’s laptop a couple of times, whatever he was looking at gone by the time you properly look at the screen. You don’t ask, you don’t know how, and that’s for the best, really, if Cas wants to know something, it’s good that he has the means to do so independently, now, it is, and you can ignore the sadness at the thought that he doesn’t trust you to ask, or that he doesn’t think you know, and you know you’re not the sharpest tool in the box, you’re not smart, but you know humanity, and Cas wouldn’t need to look up something about anything else, right? So, whatever, he doesn’t want to ask you, you’ve already gone through it once, you can survive Cas leaving too.

You can’t sleep. Everything is dark, everything is quiet, you don’t have to worry about anything getting at you, not in the Impala, not with an angel who may or may not be about to abandon you on speed dial, you don’t have to worry about Sam judging you for whatever it is today, alcohol or sex or who the fuck knows at this point.

You can’t sleep, but the guilt today was strong, you didn’t grab any of the bottles you constantly lug around with you, you didn’t want to go to a bar, not tonight. You can’t sleep, and whenever you can’t sleep you always manage to break your own rule, you think of that incubus hunt, and of grinding against Cas, and of Cas pinning you to the wall, and of Cas rejecting you, and of everything you let yourself think about in those moments, and of Sam out in the parking lot, Sam who didn’t believe Cas when he said you had wanted pie.

You can’t sleep, and your thoughts go far back, and you remember, you remember, and you don’t want to.

Your thoughts are never pretty when you can’t sleep, but they’re never pretty anyway, right? You’re a man, a son, a brother, nothing about you is pretty, is it? Nothing about you can be pretty, you’re not a woman.

Sometimes you hate that part of your brain, the part that’s filled with hatred and anger and should-do-better’s that are always, always, always, for you. You’re never good enough for your own mind, how could you be for someone else? Sam and Cas will realize it, Cas is already realizing it, and they’ll leave, they won’t look back, you’ll be alone again, and that’s all you deserve, really, you don’t deserve anything good, and Sam was already too much, but Cas? A literal angel? There’s no way you deserve him too, even if you could bring yourself to believe that you deserve Sam.

Cas told you he used to build stars, when the universe was being created, he said he helped an older angel, one who created beautiful nebulae, one who thought that Alpha Centauri was lonely and created two stars to keep it company, but he hasn’t seen them since Lucifer’s rebellion. He thinks they died in the civil war, but he can’t remember them, not their name, not the feeling of their Grace, not their form apart from something that may have been a snake, but he’s not sure. He was young at the time, still not a soldier, and you can’t really imagine Cas before him being one, but thinking that he created something you can still see, something you can look at when you can’t sleep and you don’t want to think your thoughts makes you smile. You never asked him which stars he helped the other angel build, if he helped them with Alpha Centauri’s siblings, maybe you should, he looks happy when he talks about the time when the Host was one, when God was still with them and his siblings weren’t set on killing each other.

There’s a flutter of wings somewhere on your right, but you don’t look, you can’t.

“You were praying to me,” Cas says.

“I wasn’t,” you respond, because you weren’t. Were you? No, you weren’t, Cas is the last person you want to see in this moment, you’d take Sam’s judging every day over Cas coming to you when you can’t sleep.

“It was not a formal prayer, but some part of you was calling out to me rather insistently.”

You don’t answer. Your heart is in your throat, beating loudly in your ears, your hands are itching for something, knife or bottle or gun or whatever else, your blood is coursing through your veins with fight or flight responses. If you were capable of outrunning an angel, you would.

“How did you find me?” Because you know that even if you were praying to him, Cas shouldn’t have been able to find you, not with the book he wrote on your ribs.

“Your car is quite distinctive.”

You can’t stop a proud smile, even if even that short sentence is enough to make you worry, but nobody found you through Baby when they really wanted to, so does that mean—

But Cas is here, but Cas isn’t a normal angel, not anymore, maybe he’s never been, and he’s beginning to think like humans more and more, so maybe that was enough, that and the fact that he knows you’d never leave Baby too far away.

You don’t say anything, you don’t know what to say, but you don’t hear wings fluttering, so Cas is still here, but you can’t look at him, you keep looking at stars that he may or may not have helped another angel build.

You feel him lean against Baby’s door, and you know you should snap at him, yell at him to be careful, and something in you is clamouring to do it, but a large part of you is relieved that he’s not trying to talk, that he’s not forcing you to acknowledge the changed dynamics in your relationship, and you know he’s being careful anyway, so you don’t say anything and let a nuclear reactor in human form lean against your car.

You don’t talk, neither of you, but your thoughts are no longer on the stars above you, they’re on the angel beside you, and you crave him, you crave his touch, you crave just that brush of his hand on your arm of when he heals your liver from your almost-daily abuse, you crave being physically close to someone again, now that neither of you is a kid anymore and you can’t hold Sam at night.

Your head turns to the side almost against your will, but Cas is not looking at you, he’s looking up at the stars, at the sky, maybe at Heaven, and you feel a pang of something, a pang of you don’t even know what, because Cas is here, down on Earth with you and Sam more and more, and he must be missing his home, but you keep him here, and you’ve always been selfish and clingy and needy, but now your selfishness is keeping a literal angel shackled on Earth, you’ve reached a new low in what is the downward slope of Dean Winchester’s life, but you don’t want to climb back up if it means losing Cas, you’re too selfish and clingy and needy to let him go now that he could stay, and you try to ignore the corner of your mind that’s reminding you that Cas will leave, that Cas is already about to leave, and it’ll have been your fault, you’ll have alienated the angel who told you that you deserve to be saved, because you don’t, do you, you don’t deserve to be saved, you’re poison, and Cas should’ve left you to rot in Hell where you belonged.

“You are still praying to me,” Cas says, but he doesn’t look at you, he doesn’t avert his eyes from the stars, from Heaven, but you know that he knows that you’re looking at him, but he’s not saying anything and you’re grateful for that.

“I’m not,” you say, but you probably are, Cas would know if you’re still praying to him, Cas always knows when you’re praying to him, so you must be doing it, even if you don’t want to, even if you don’t mean to, you’re still praying to him and you don’t know how to stop, but that’s the story of your life, isn’t it?

Cas turns, and the night sky is not the only blue thing you can see anymore.

“What do you want from me, Dean?” he asks, and your heart sinks to your feet, because you know what you want from Cas, you want him to stay, you want him to touch you, to keep touching you, you want him to hold you, you want him to always, always be there, but you can’t tell him that, you can’t, he’d feel forced to stay, and you may want him to, but you want him to decide that he wants to stay, you want him to want to stay not because you need him here, with you, but because he wants to be with you. You’d even—but it doesn’t matter, Cas doesn’t feel like that, he showed that two months ago, he made it perfectly clear.

Cas sees that you’re scrambling to come up with a lie, scrambling to try and explain that you want him here without saying the words, and he smiles at you, a small smile tinged with sadness, and it’s your fault that he’s sad, it’s your fault for everything that happened to Cas in these two years since you broke the surface of your own grave.

“I just ask that you be truthful,” he says, and you—

You swallow, you steel your mind, you wall your heart. Here, now, there’s no Sam to judge you, there’s no Sam to discover that the brother he knows is not real, has never been real. Here, now, there’s just you and Cas, and Cas already knows, but he wants you to say it, and you can’t deny him, not here, not now.

“I want you to stay. I want you to—” You swallow again. You know you have to say it, you know this is safe, Cas is safe, but there’s still that nagging doubt, but you’ll never have a chance like this again. “I want you to stay here, on Earth, with me and Sam. I want you to—to keep touching me, and not just when you’re healing me. I want you to—” You can’t say it, not this, you can’t say it, he’ll be disgusted, he’ll leave, or he’ll stay and he’ll pretend it’s fine, but it’s not fine, it’s not, you’re not fine, you’re wrong, you’re broken, there’s something wrong with you, and Cas is an angel, what would he say?

“I love you,” Cas says like it’s nothing, and it’s not nothing, it can’t be nothing, he can’t love you, he can’t, he can’t, he’ll want—but he’s Cas, and you want Cas to stay, and you, you want him to stay, whatever it takes, whatever you’ll have to give him, you need him to stay.

Then you remember he asked you to be truthful, and you can’t lie, not on this, he asked you to be truthful, and you owe him at least this, this if not everything else.

“I’m not in love you.”

Cas nods, but you can’t look at him, you can’t, you can’t watch his sad smile slip away to be replaced with a frown of disgust, so you look back up at the stars and not at him, you won’t watch him leaving, not now.

“I am not in love with you either,” he says, and—

You look back at him, because it can’t be, you must have heard it wrong, Cas can’t have said what you think he’s said, he can’t, this is not your life. “But you said—”

Cas shakes his head. His smile is still small, still sad, but there’s something in his eyes you’ve never seen before, there’s something more human than you’ve ever seen in his eyes, and you can’t read it. “There is a difference between loving someone and being in love with them,” he says, and of course he didn’t mean it like that, he’s not human, he says what he means, he’s too literal. “As you know.”

Your blood freezes in your chest, but your heart is beating loudly, too loudly, even a human could hear it, but Cas is not human, he’s not human, the noise must be as deafening to him as it is to you.

He knows, Cas knows.

“I—I—” But you can’t speak, you can’t lie, you can’t dig your way out of yet another grave. Cas knows, he knows that you’re wrong, he knows that there’s something wrong with you, he knows, and now he’ll leave and you’ll never see him again, you won’t see him again, you won’t see him again, he’ll leave and there’s nothing you can lure him back with, nothing, no disappeared fathers, no demons to hunt, no Apocalypse to avert. Cas will leave, and you’ll lose the only friend you have left that’s not related to you.

“Humans call it aromanticism,” Cas says, and you don’t know what it means, you have no idea, you don’t know where he found it, you don’t know when, why was he searching for a name to your wrongness? “There is a spectrum, but the word means that a human is not romantically attracted to anyone. I thought about it, and I realized that–though I am not human and the term seems to be intended for humans only–I am aromantic.” What, what is he saying? Wasn’t he talking about you? But…But he said he’s—And the description, that’s—But no, that's a legitimate thing, that's a thing that people are, but you can't be that, can you, you're just wrong, you're nothing legitimate.

“Cas,” you whisper, and you don’t even know when you’ve turned back to him, but he’s looking at you, and his eyes shine with an all-human light, he seems human in this moment, he’s not the powerful Angel of the Lord who raised you from Hell and rebuilt your soul from the blackened, jagged pieces that tortured souls in the Pit.

Cas’ smile grows a fraction but he doesn’t let you speak, you don’t even know what you’d say, maybe it’s better if he talks more, maybe you’ll have time to unscramble your thoughts, to reassert reality over your unfounded hope, to understand that what he’s said doesn’t apply to you, it’s not something for you, you’re just wrong and broken and selfish and clingy and needy, you need hope that you’re not the monster you know you are.

“I understood that I am asexual too, which means that I am not sexually attracted to anyone either. I am quite distressed by sex, actually.”

Shit. Shit, shit, shit!

“So that time with the stripper—And the incubus—” You can’t finish your sentence, you can’t, guilt and shame and disgust at yourself are all clamouring inside you, all coalescing into a dark ball of self-hatred that lodges in your throat and stops you from speaking.

Cas’ smile dims, and you did it, you caused this too, you ruined an angel, you dragged him into the mud with you because you can’t be alone for five minutes, can you, you can’t be alone with yourself because you’re too selfish, too clingy, too greedy, you crave someone by your side and you’ll do anything to have it, won’t you? You ruined your brother’s life, again. You made an angel fall for you. You’re poison, and Sam and Cas will understand it.

“Those were not pleasant situations,” he admits. His eyes are distant, nothing human remains, you even think you see a flicker of supernatural blue, a flicker of Grace, “though at the time I did not understand what I was feeling nor why.”

“I’m sorry, Cas,” you say, your voice broken, broken, broken like you, who made an angel fall and then tainted him too.

“You did not know, and the second time you were not yourself,” Cas says, but he can’t make excuses, you don’t deserve it, you deserve his anger, you deserve his hatred, you deserve to be the next corpse with burnt-out eyes in his wake, you deserve him throwing you back into Hell and you can’t understand how he could forgive you this easily, like this.

“I love you, Dean, even if not in the way humans typically think of it,” he repeats, and it’s not less undeserved the second time, it’s not less unbelievable.

“You can’t,” you choke out, you spit out, because you’re right, he can’t love you in any way, he should hate you, should curse the air you breath, he can’t love you, he can’t. “You’re an angel, and I’m—I’m—” There are many ways to end that sentence, but you can’t find any of them because Cas is suddenly there, right in your face, and you gulp at the supernatural blue lurking in his eyes because this is it, this is the moment you die, you really die and stay dead, no deals to have you back, no angels to raise you from perdition, this is your final one-way ticket to the deepest and darkest part of Hell, this is the ticket to where you belong.

“You are none of the things you are thinking,” Cas growls, and your ears hurt a little, he must be talking with his true voice too, you pushed an angel to lose control again, you’re not good for anyone. “You are the most brilliant soul I have ever seen in all of Creation. You shone so bright even in Hell that I had no problems in locating you amongst all the smoke and fires and fights on the day I raised you from perdition. You are not any of the deprecating things you think yourself and I care about you, Dean Winchester.”

That’s even worse than love, somehow, caring is scarier than love, caring is a whole other beast scarier than anything you’ve ever faced.

“Cas—”

Cas’ eyes lose the glow of Grace and his face is suddenly back to be a human’s face, not the mask above an eldritch horror as big as the Chrysler Building, just the face of another human like you. “What do you want from me?” he asks again, and his voice is steel, but it’s only a human voice, it doesn’t ring with the power capable of smiting a whole town you know is there, it’s just the voice of a frustrated, angry, normal human.

“I want you to stay,” you say again, your vision blurry, and shit, when have you started crying, there are tears in your eyes and a sob behind your words, but Cas smiles again, a beautiful smile, and you don’t believe him, you still think there’s something wrong with you, you’re not the brilliant soul he thinks you are, but for once, just for this instant, you let yourself hope, you let yourself think that maybe, maybe, this angel, your angel, is right.

“Then I will stay for as long as you will have me.”

**Author's Note:**

> There may be another part, seeing that this was set to end in another way and there should've been Sam somewhere in there.
> 
> If someone thinks Cas' starmaker friend sauntered vaguely downwards to become a demon who loves humanity (and a part-time rare book dealer angel), they'd be absolutely correct.
> 
> Anyway, thanks for reading, if you want to tell me what you thought of this or yell at me for getting something wrong/offending someone (which wasn't my intention and I'm sorry if it happened) drop me a comment. Or don't, up to you.


End file.
